PUBLIC MARKS with tags "virtual machine" & virtualization

August 2007

Now that Virtual PC is finally free, I've become obsessed with producing the smallest possible Windows XP Virtual PC image. It's quite a challenge, because a default XP install can eat up well over a gigabyte. Once you factor in the swapfile and other overhead, you're generally talking about around 2-4 gigabytes for relatively simple configurations.
My best result so far, however, is a 641 megabyte virtual machine image of a clean, fully patched Windows XP install. Not bad. And here's how I did it.

innotek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)